Smart beer recipe search engine substituting ingredients

[paxpelus]

HI all, I am a programmer and I am thinking of creating an advanced search engine for beer recipes.

I am always struggling to use my old supplies of malt & hops and the main problem is that I can't find recipes where I can use most of my supplies.

So I was thinking of creating a smart search engine that will substitute some parts of the recipe e.g. if I enter that I have 20g of Colombus hop it would propose recipes that use any of the following hops Magnum, Chinook, Northern Brewer, Warrior, Millenium, Bullion.

Also it could display recipes in the following format

Recipe A - You have 4 out of 5 ingredients
Recipe B - You have 5 out of 8 ingredients
Recipe C - You have 4 out of 7 ingredients

This way I could choose to use most of my supplies (Recipe B) or choose to create a recipe that needs me to order just a single hop or malt.

The whole idea came to my mind when I struggled to use some of my supplies I had in my shelves. I had to waste so many hours reading recipes and finding which recipes will use most of my malts & hops and which ingredients I needed to buy.

I am in the process of calculating the total cost of such software as it will consume many hours of my time and it will need some extra work from designers, require some hosting etc.

So my questions are:

1. What do you think is better, to create a simple search engine you can use to find recipes that suits your supplies or create a complete platform to keep track of your recipes, create new recipes etc?
2. How useful such software would be? Would you use it? Would you pay a yearly fee for using it?

 

[DaWhip]

My opinions - Sounds awesome! Personally, I doubt I would use all the functionality, but being able to search by one or 2 ingredients and going through a list would be great. So to answer question 1, I would be more interested in the search engine, assuming you have a big enough recipe pool.

I have found that frustrating with Brewer's Friend since they already have my inventory and a huge recipe database, but they can't narrow the search by ingredients on hand (that I am aware of). Honestly, this sounds like a great tool that I would use, but I wouldn't pay out of pocket for it. I already have too many other subscriptions that are higher priority than this. I wouldn't mind if it had ads and such though. or a free tier (search by up to 3 ingredients) and a premium tier (unlimited ingredients/inventory management)? Even better, sell it to Brewer's Friend to integrate with their recipe database!

 

[paxpelus]

Thanks for your feedback and ideas. I like the idea of including a inventory manager along this. I also need to include the Add/View Recipe functionality in order for users to add or view the recipes. So keeping a log of your brews is something feasible.

But my main goal is to create a smart enough search engine so I can finally get rid of all my fermentables & hops